Word: clef
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...clash and carryings-on over Soap aside, television's instant-history movies have been the season's most hotly debated entertainment. When ABC let loose with its twelve-hour Watergate roman à clef, Washington: Behind Closed Doors, last fall, half the critics and columnists in the country attacked the mini-series for playing fast and loose with recent political fact. Then the same network aired a so-called docudrama, The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, to even harsher criticism. Now NBC and CBS are getting ready to take their lumps. King, a six-hour miniseries consecrated...
When Saul Bellow wrote his roman a clef, Humboldt's Gift, even knowledgeable readers had trouble recalling the model for Von Humboldt Fleisher. The difficulty would not have occurred if Bellow's chief character had been based on Robert Lowell or John Berry man or Theodore Roethke. Yet, for these celebrated poets, Delmore Schwartz was once the front runner of their generation...
Annie Hall. Even though it's based on his real-life relationship with co-star Diane Keaton, Woody Allen's latest--and arguably best--film is far more than cinema a clef. Allen's sensitive, sometimes painfully realistic portrait of a failed love affair between a neurotic but lovable New York Jew and a flaky midwestern WASP marks a generally successful departure in thematic approach: "Annie Hall" goes much farther in exploring human relationships than any of Allen's previous films. Still, the best moments in the film are the deliberate send-ups in which Allen unleashes his scathing...
Annie Hall. Even though it's based on his real-life relationship with co-star Diane Keaton, Woody Allen's latest--and arguably best--film is far more than cinema a clef. Allen's sensitive, sometimes painfully realistic portrait of a failed love affair between a neurotic but lovable New York Jew and a flaky midwestern WASP marks a generally successful departure in thematic approach; "Annie Hall" hoes much farther in exploring human relationships than any of Allen's previous films. Still, the best moments in the film are the deliberate send-ups in which Allen unleashes his scathing...
After completing another spy novel, A Small Town in Germany?also underrated by critics?the author attempted a "serious" work, The Naive and Sentimental Lover. The knowledgeable thought it a roman à clef, a riposte to Some Gorgeous Accident, written by Cornwell's close friend, the late novelist James Kellavar. Both books concerned misadventures of two men in love with the same woman. Lover had not a belted trench-coat in sight?and the book proved the sole bomb of the Le Carré career. It also coincided with the end of the Cornwell marriage. "Like all divorces, it was awful...